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Greetings, financial wizards, planners, and keepers of double-book accounting! The New York Times reports on the rising amounts of corrupt debt assistance companies, taking one of the best techniques of banks and payday lenders alike to extract fees from their customers and leave them in a worse credit situation than when they sought help. And if you don’t pay them or your credit cards back, becoming a prisoner for nonpayment of debt is still happening, even though prisons specifically for the purpose of housing debtors were abolished.
If you own a mobile home, and you don’t own the land underneath it, you could be evicted should the landowner decide to sell out to someone else. Maryland is considering legilation that would make it more difficult for a park owner to just up and sell, requiring contingency plans and support of up to 10 months for the homeowners while they searched for a new location.
For those feeling overwhelmed or think they could get this one past the radar, Recess At Work sounds like a great idea. Not just for building morale, either, but for getting away from the soul-sucking drudgery.
Last, if you’re considering and want to be Gone Forever from various social networking sites, here's a roundup of how to permanently delete yourself on those services that allow for permanent deletion.
Out in the world today, we’ll start with some levity. The Vatican likes The Blues Brothers, despite the flagrant use of foul language, breaking several traffic laws, deceit, repeated attempted murder, and the presence of Illinois Nazis.
The Seychelles and Kenya have agreed to start having trials for pirates based in Somalia, accpeting more than $9 million USD in donations to fund the trials.
The Russian Prime Minister, Vladimir Putin, believes the T-50 fighter plane will be superior to its American counterpart, the F-22 Raptor. We haven’t had a good arms race in decades, and with changes in policy to try and deal with salvos of short-range shots, we might be seeing weapons manufacturers start rubbing their palms again.
Looking to try and recognize his cinematic vision, frustrated with not being able to hire a director, Kim Jong-Il kidnapped one from south Korea and forced him to make a movie about a socialist kaiju.
Domestically, now we’re getting to see not just the shoreline cost, but the cost of all the marine life that's being killed in burning the oil to keep it from getting to the shoreline, and we find the design for the Deepwater Horizons wellwas considered "risky" by investigators - both things that BP would like you not to think about too much, so you don’t connect the dots and see that this looked to be a preventable event, and then when it happened, the company relied on old technology, lowballed their estimates, and is now desperately trying not to look like the reckless, careless, profit-driven corporation that it is. Instead, they’d prefer that you take their survey of How BP you are. We suggest not having beverages while taking the survey. Someone who scored really well on how BP he is, Representative Barton of Texas accused the President and the administration of a "shakedown" when BP agreed to set up escrow funds to pay claims with, and apologized to the oil company. After finding out that saying such a thing initiates a blowback from your own party that will burn off your eyebrows, he apologized for the apology and retracted what he had said before.
Governor Jindal of Louisiana fumed as barges intended for the Gulf were stopped by the Coast Guard to ensure they had proper safety equipment aboard.
Mr. Greenwald charts the course of the recent well-publicized leak arrest, including how much the government must like the atomsphere that leaking is dangrous and supporting Wikileaks may make you a national security threat, the startling breach of journalistic ethics by the hacker who turned the leaker in, and the fact that we're not even close to getting the full story on anything, possibly based on the fairly cozy relationship between the hacker and the writer. So instead of praising a whistleblower and investigating further into his claims, we’re arresting him for leaking secrets and trying to intimidate all the other whistleblowers into silence. What part of “the most transparent government in years” does this belong to?
Some lawmakers staying at the C Street house, run by the Family, received letters from the Office of Congressional Ethics indicating OCE doesn't think that their way below market rent is any sort of improper gift from the Family to the lawmakers. One wonders why the OCE is concluding so - because well-below market rent to lawmakers certainly sounds like someone’s trading influence for rent.
Old headstones from the Arlington National Cemetary were discovered in a creek bed, apparently used as erosion barriers. The military is working on recovering the stones and making sure their removal doesn’t cause environmental damage.
Setting up for a nice tension of ideas, a group dedicated to creating a Muslim empire worldwide will be hosting its second conference in Chicago. Why should we care? Well, it’s THEM, and at least according to some of the persons interviewed, the group is indoctrinating young people into the ways of thought that align them with al-Qaeda or the Taliban. History often says that when you try to suppress something, you make it more popular and give it power. Stop the persons who attempt to do illegal things and try to show the silliness of what they’re talking about, and you’ll be able to get rid of them faster.
And last out for tonight, the Zero Tolerance Makes Zero Sense squad tellus the forces of Thought and Rationality prevail, as a Rhode Island school that banned a child's hat that had toy soldiers on it (no weapons in school, you see) is now working on changing the policy. Because centimeters-wide plastic barrels are a threat and a danger to the students and the staff. That’s the lead-in, though. On a similar sort of vein, a black teen with Asperger's was arrested based on a hearsay account that he was near an elementary school with a gun, which the subsequent search did not find, and also accused of using pepper spray on the responding officer that sprayed him. (For more information from Neli’s mother’s perspective, visit A Voice For Neli) The teen has been held without bail, only allowed to see his mother once, and has been transferred to a mental hospital for evaluation, apparently. While racial profiling and racism have not been overtly charged by the mother against the police, the divergent accounts of how the situation was handled and the fact that Neli sitting outside made him “suspicious” and the caller assumed he had a gun does not look favorably upon the residents nor the police department’s handling of the situation.
Into technology, where stem cell treatments are still not ready for primetime, rats are born with neurons primed for navigation, and a robot plays pool.
Opinions floor, now stopping. R. Mathieu points out how patriotism and its symbols have been hijacked by the jingoist side of the political spectrum and that liberals need to return patriotism to a proper definition, one that allows for someone to be proud of a country and still work tirelessly to improve it.
Mr. Marshall Mathers does a quick interview with the NYT about the evolution of Eminem from Slim Shady to his newest album, including many lifestyle changes.
Dana Boyd reminds us of COPPA, the requirement that permission be obtained for under-13s to collect information from them, and what we can do to it to make it a more effective tool for protecting privacy, instead of the nuisance some parents feel it is and how they teach kids to lie about their age for certain things.
And into stranger places, where the Deepwater Horizons accident is apparently the perfect vehicle for the EPA to take over the industrial sector and choke it if they so choose, the federal government is apparently killing recovery efforts in the Gulf by not waiving an act that requires good shipped between U.S. ports be on U.S. ships staffed with U.S. crews, speaking the lie that foreign assistance has been turned away because of this law, a lie being reported across several spheres, subverting the rule of law and replacing it with something more akin to mafia rule by making BP put assets into escrow, instead of letting the company fail in The Market (A.P.T.I.N.), (like hell there’s anything standing in the way of that...) making political decisions like moratoriums on all drilling and falsely claiming experts approved of them, when the experts say what the government did is grandstanding and not helpful, and telling seniors that they can look forward to rationing of medical care and lower living benefits.
Apparently, the President has no experience administrating, which is apparently why he can't put us on a path to fix the oil spill. (Another count for the lie about the Jones Act, as well.) And when he tried to make a big speech, he was long on generalities and plans to cap and trade and short on specifics that might work. (Wait, no, he was. But a lot of Republicans think necessary regulations are dumb ones, Mr. Steyn.) And, of course, as “everyone knows”, actually going to a more renewables-based economy will be financially and economically disastrous.
But it’s not just economics. Mr. Hanson returns to the idea that the Obama foreign policy of apology and "not Bush" makes for insulted allies and aggressive enemies and that there’s no actual intent of this Administration to stand up and be the shining example that Reagan, George Bush I, II, and Bill Clinton were all about, darkly hinting that the end of the Obama presidency might be marked by an event like the Iranian hostage crisis.
Truth is, the President is being run over by bad luck and the twin desires from Americans that the government fix things when they go wrong and the government have no power to actually ensure things get fixed when they go wrong. It makes the government look like they can’t accomplish anything, feeding into the opposition’s main mantra that government can’t accomplish anything, and so there should be less of it.
Staying on that line of thinking, Mr. Williams thinks he's waxing poetic about The Market (A.P.T.I.N.) and its Inherent Superiority that forces businesses to please customers to be profitable, but instead he comes off as complaining about government services as wastes of taxpayer dollars and wishing they were all privatized. And Mr. Williams, citing Wal-Mart as his example of a pleasing and profitable business, turns a very blind eye to how Wal-Mart treats its suppliers, employees, and what it thinks of organized labour in search of its profits. Or, perhaps, the way that British Petroleum cut corners on safety to make profit. People will part with their money if they like you, yes, but they will also part with their money if you’re the only place in town, or you’re the cheapest place in a low-income town. A lot of people don’t like Wal-Mart at all, but don’t have much of a choice about shopping there because it’s the only way they get through the month without running out of money.
Mr. Sowell is at least a little bit better in claiming that FDR's new deal policies prolonged a depression, while Reagan’s shrug at the crash of 1987 helped rebuild us back to prosperity afterward. The lesson that we’re supposed to take is that the longer the Obama Administration interferes, the longer the recession will be. One wonders, though, as to how well the FDR-regulated economy, once spun up, would continue just going right along, instead of the spikes and variances that our modern times have experienced due to deregulation. If you beleive conservative CW, of course, “everyone knows”, more regulation just means more evasion, so the correct course of action is to screw the regulations and force the people to suffer for a bad corporate decision, then assume the people will revenge themselves on the corporation through the powers of not buying from them. Which might work, in a market that’s not dealing in necessary commodities and has alternatives to get the thing desired, and has multiple employers that can take on any of the workers that decide to leave the bad decision company and find work elsewhere (assuming, of course, those workers can just uproot themselves and move.) It sounds nice and perfectly logical, right? And everyone knows there’s no way in hell that will ever happen. The first time a gun manufacturer’s weapon jams in the middle of a firefight and gets a soldier killed, someone will be rushing to regulate things.
And at the end of opinions, the Heritage Foundation praises a Heritage foundation researcher writing that marriage is the best antipoverty element the country has available to it, so we should be promoting everyone to get married before they have kids. The article seems not to want to talk a lot about how those single mothers became single mothers, just mentioning in passing that it’s not teen pregnancies, but women in their twenties and thirties - ones much more likely to be divorced and single mothers instead of unmarried mothers. But that’s not important. What’s important is that all those single mothers need to go out and find a man so they can get out of poverty and lift their kids out of poverty. And to dismantle the welfare system these queens have figured out how to navigate and exploit so they’ll be forced to get and stay married, even if the man is completely wrong for them. Sounds historical.
Last for tonight, a painful lesson - it's probably a bad idea to let random people wax off your genital hair, even if it is for charity. It would be akin to reporting on sports in the same manner that we report and discuss science.
Oh, and a book of lists compiled or about librarians. Should be fun.
If you own a mobile home, and you don’t own the land underneath it, you could be evicted should the landowner decide to sell out to someone else. Maryland is considering legilation that would make it more difficult for a park owner to just up and sell, requiring contingency plans and support of up to 10 months for the homeowners while they searched for a new location.
For those feeling overwhelmed or think they could get this one past the radar, Recess At Work sounds like a great idea. Not just for building morale, either, but for getting away from the soul-sucking drudgery.
Last, if you’re considering and want to be Gone Forever from various social networking sites, here's a roundup of how to permanently delete yourself on those services that allow for permanent deletion.
Out in the world today, we’ll start with some levity. The Vatican likes The Blues Brothers, despite the flagrant use of foul language, breaking several traffic laws, deceit, repeated attempted murder, and the presence of Illinois Nazis.
The Seychelles and Kenya have agreed to start having trials for pirates based in Somalia, accpeting more than $9 million USD in donations to fund the trials.
The Russian Prime Minister, Vladimir Putin, believes the T-50 fighter plane will be superior to its American counterpart, the F-22 Raptor. We haven’t had a good arms race in decades, and with changes in policy to try and deal with salvos of short-range shots, we might be seeing weapons manufacturers start rubbing their palms again.
Looking to try and recognize his cinematic vision, frustrated with not being able to hire a director, Kim Jong-Il kidnapped one from south Korea and forced him to make a movie about a socialist kaiju.
Domestically, now we’re getting to see not just the shoreline cost, but the cost of all the marine life that's being killed in burning the oil to keep it from getting to the shoreline, and we find the design for the Deepwater Horizons wellwas considered "risky" by investigators - both things that BP would like you not to think about too much, so you don’t connect the dots and see that this looked to be a preventable event, and then when it happened, the company relied on old technology, lowballed their estimates, and is now desperately trying not to look like the reckless, careless, profit-driven corporation that it is. Instead, they’d prefer that you take their survey of How BP you are. We suggest not having beverages while taking the survey. Someone who scored really well on how BP he is, Representative Barton of Texas accused the President and the administration of a "shakedown" when BP agreed to set up escrow funds to pay claims with, and apologized to the oil company. After finding out that saying such a thing initiates a blowback from your own party that will burn off your eyebrows, he apologized for the apology and retracted what he had said before.
Governor Jindal of Louisiana fumed as barges intended for the Gulf were stopped by the Coast Guard to ensure they had proper safety equipment aboard.
Mr. Greenwald charts the course of the recent well-publicized leak arrest, including how much the government must like the atomsphere that leaking is dangrous and supporting Wikileaks may make you a national security threat, the startling breach of journalistic ethics by the hacker who turned the leaker in, and the fact that we're not even close to getting the full story on anything, possibly based on the fairly cozy relationship between the hacker and the writer. So instead of praising a whistleblower and investigating further into his claims, we’re arresting him for leaking secrets and trying to intimidate all the other whistleblowers into silence. What part of “the most transparent government in years” does this belong to?
Some lawmakers staying at the C Street house, run by the Family, received letters from the Office of Congressional Ethics indicating OCE doesn't think that their way below market rent is any sort of improper gift from the Family to the lawmakers. One wonders why the OCE is concluding so - because well-below market rent to lawmakers certainly sounds like someone’s trading influence for rent.
Old headstones from the Arlington National Cemetary were discovered in a creek bed, apparently used as erosion barriers. The military is working on recovering the stones and making sure their removal doesn’t cause environmental damage.
Setting up for a nice tension of ideas, a group dedicated to creating a Muslim empire worldwide will be hosting its second conference in Chicago. Why should we care? Well, it’s THEM, and at least according to some of the persons interviewed, the group is indoctrinating young people into the ways of thought that align them with al-Qaeda or the Taliban. History often says that when you try to suppress something, you make it more popular and give it power. Stop the persons who attempt to do illegal things and try to show the silliness of what they’re talking about, and you’ll be able to get rid of them faster.
And last out for tonight, the Zero Tolerance Makes Zero Sense squad tellus the forces of Thought and Rationality prevail, as a Rhode Island school that banned a child's hat that had toy soldiers on it (no weapons in school, you see) is now working on changing the policy. Because centimeters-wide plastic barrels are a threat and a danger to the students and the staff. That’s the lead-in, though. On a similar sort of vein, a black teen with Asperger's was arrested based on a hearsay account that he was near an elementary school with a gun, which the subsequent search did not find, and also accused of using pepper spray on the responding officer that sprayed him. (For more information from Neli’s mother’s perspective, visit A Voice For Neli) The teen has been held without bail, only allowed to see his mother once, and has been transferred to a mental hospital for evaluation, apparently. While racial profiling and racism have not been overtly charged by the mother against the police, the divergent accounts of how the situation was handled and the fact that Neli sitting outside made him “suspicious” and the caller assumed he had a gun does not look favorably upon the residents nor the police department’s handling of the situation.
Into technology, where stem cell treatments are still not ready for primetime, rats are born with neurons primed for navigation, and a robot plays pool.
Opinions floor, now stopping. R. Mathieu points out how patriotism and its symbols have been hijacked by the jingoist side of the political spectrum and that liberals need to return patriotism to a proper definition, one that allows for someone to be proud of a country and still work tirelessly to improve it.
Mr. Marshall Mathers does a quick interview with the NYT about the evolution of Eminem from Slim Shady to his newest album, including many lifestyle changes.
Dana Boyd reminds us of COPPA, the requirement that permission be obtained for under-13s to collect information from them, and what we can do to it to make it a more effective tool for protecting privacy, instead of the nuisance some parents feel it is and how they teach kids to lie about their age for certain things.
And into stranger places, where the Deepwater Horizons accident is apparently the perfect vehicle for the EPA to take over the industrial sector and choke it if they so choose, the federal government is apparently killing recovery efforts in the Gulf by not waiving an act that requires good shipped between U.S. ports be on U.S. ships staffed with U.S. crews, speaking the lie that foreign assistance has been turned away because of this law, a lie being reported across several spheres, subverting the rule of law and replacing it with something more akin to mafia rule by making BP put assets into escrow, instead of letting the company fail in The Market (A.P.T.I.N.), (like hell there’s anything standing in the way of that...) making political decisions like moratoriums on all drilling and falsely claiming experts approved of them, when the experts say what the government did is grandstanding and not helpful, and telling seniors that they can look forward to rationing of medical care and lower living benefits.
Apparently, the President has no experience administrating, which is apparently why he can't put us on a path to fix the oil spill. (Another count for the lie about the Jones Act, as well.) And when he tried to make a big speech, he was long on generalities and plans to cap and trade and short on specifics that might work. (Wait, no, he was. But a lot of Republicans think necessary regulations are dumb ones, Mr. Steyn.) And, of course, as “everyone knows”, actually going to a more renewables-based economy will be financially and economically disastrous.
But it’s not just economics. Mr. Hanson returns to the idea that the Obama foreign policy of apology and "not Bush" makes for insulted allies and aggressive enemies and that there’s no actual intent of this Administration to stand up and be the shining example that Reagan, George Bush I, II, and Bill Clinton were all about, darkly hinting that the end of the Obama presidency might be marked by an event like the Iranian hostage crisis.
Truth is, the President is being run over by bad luck and the twin desires from Americans that the government fix things when they go wrong and the government have no power to actually ensure things get fixed when they go wrong. It makes the government look like they can’t accomplish anything, feeding into the opposition’s main mantra that government can’t accomplish anything, and so there should be less of it.
Staying on that line of thinking, Mr. Williams thinks he's waxing poetic about The Market (A.P.T.I.N.) and its Inherent Superiority that forces businesses to please customers to be profitable, but instead he comes off as complaining about government services as wastes of taxpayer dollars and wishing they were all privatized. And Mr. Williams, citing Wal-Mart as his example of a pleasing and profitable business, turns a very blind eye to how Wal-Mart treats its suppliers, employees, and what it thinks of organized labour in search of its profits. Or, perhaps, the way that British Petroleum cut corners on safety to make profit. People will part with their money if they like you, yes, but they will also part with their money if you’re the only place in town, or you’re the cheapest place in a low-income town. A lot of people don’t like Wal-Mart at all, but don’t have much of a choice about shopping there because it’s the only way they get through the month without running out of money.
Mr. Sowell is at least a little bit better in claiming that FDR's new deal policies prolonged a depression, while Reagan’s shrug at the crash of 1987 helped rebuild us back to prosperity afterward. The lesson that we’re supposed to take is that the longer the Obama Administration interferes, the longer the recession will be. One wonders, though, as to how well the FDR-regulated economy, once spun up, would continue just going right along, instead of the spikes and variances that our modern times have experienced due to deregulation. If you beleive conservative CW, of course, “everyone knows”, more regulation just means more evasion, so the correct course of action is to screw the regulations and force the people to suffer for a bad corporate decision, then assume the people will revenge themselves on the corporation through the powers of not buying from them. Which might work, in a market that’s not dealing in necessary commodities and has alternatives to get the thing desired, and has multiple employers that can take on any of the workers that decide to leave the bad decision company and find work elsewhere (assuming, of course, those workers can just uproot themselves and move.) It sounds nice and perfectly logical, right? And everyone knows there’s no way in hell that will ever happen. The first time a gun manufacturer’s weapon jams in the middle of a firefight and gets a soldier killed, someone will be rushing to regulate things.
And at the end of opinions, the Heritage Foundation praises a Heritage foundation researcher writing that marriage is the best antipoverty element the country has available to it, so we should be promoting everyone to get married before they have kids. The article seems not to want to talk a lot about how those single mothers became single mothers, just mentioning in passing that it’s not teen pregnancies, but women in their twenties and thirties - ones much more likely to be divorced and single mothers instead of unmarried mothers. But that’s not important. What’s important is that all those single mothers need to go out and find a man so they can get out of poverty and lift their kids out of poverty. And to dismantle the welfare system these queens have figured out how to navigate and exploit so they’ll be forced to get and stay married, even if the man is completely wrong for them. Sounds historical.
Last for tonight, a painful lesson - it's probably a bad idea to let random people wax off your genital hair, even if it is for charity. It would be akin to reporting on sports in the same manner that we report and discuss science.
Oh, and a book of lists compiled or about librarians. Should be fun.
